Abu Anas Al-Libi had just returned home from early-morning prayers when three masked men waving handguns jumped out of a white Mercedes van.

Within seconds, they swarmed the suspected senior Al-Qaeda leader.

“Just as my father was parking, these cars came from everywhere,” said his son, Abdullah Al-Ruqai, 21.

“There were three white cars which blocked the street, then came the van, all of them with tinted windows. The van pulled up and 10 men got out; three of them had masks and handguns fitted with silencers,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian.

Although his family says Mr. Libi is innocent of any wrongdoing, the U.S. accuses him of playing a major role in the U.S. embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed hundreds of people in 1998.

Using a practice once derided as America’s shame by leftists, the Obama administration continues to snatch suspected terrorists from foreign lands in a process known as rendition.

Mr Obama and his wife Michelle welcomed the Pakistani schoolgirl to the Oval Office on Friday, the day the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Malala had been considered a front-runner for the prize and was in Washington to speak at two events.

“I thanked President Obama for the United States’ work in supporting education in Pakistan and Afghanistan and for Syrian refugees. I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact,” she said.

The 16-year-old also called for greater cooperation between the governments of the United States and Pakistan.

The president, himself a Nobel Prize winner, signed a proclamation to mark Friday as the International Day of the Girl.

The proclamation says in part that “on every continent, there are girls who will go on to change the world in ways we can only imagine, if only we allow them the freedom to dream.”

Malala was shot in the head in October 2012 while she was going home from school. She was flown to a hospital in Britain, where she now lives. Her memoir I am Malala was published on Tuesday.